The Last Choir Practice

I joined the choir six months ago. February, right after the worst blind date of my life. The guy brought a spreadsheet of his own to dinner. His dating history, rated. I'm an accountant, I love a good spreadsheet, and even I couldn't sit through that.

So I figured I needed something in my life that wasn't numbers. Something where I couldn't check my work at the end of the night and call it done.

The community choir at St. Agnes was advertising in the library lobby. Thursday nights, no experience required. I signed up before I could talk myself out of it. I'm 34, I'd spent the last three years since my breakup doing nothing but work and safe dates that went nowhere, and my sister told me point blank I was turning into a filing cabinet with legs.

I sang alto. I'd sung alto in school and in church growing up, and it turns out that's like riding a bike. Wobbly at first, then fine.

And then there was David.

David was the tenor soloist. Forty-one years old, sales manager for some regional building supply company, jaw like a toothpaste ad. He wore button-down shirts to practice like it was a board meeting. From the first night, he held opinions about the alto section. Specifically about me.

"You're rushing the entrance," he told me, week two. We were working on a piece with a tricky staggered start, altos coming in two beats after tenors.

"I'm following Nadine," I said. Nadine runs the alto section. She's seventy and knows everything.

"Nadine's watching the piano. You're watching your folder. Big difference."

He wasn't wrong. That was the annoying part. He was never wrong, he just said it like a man handing you a bill.

So yeah, it became a thing. Me and David, the alto-tenor blend. Our two sections carried most of the harmony in the spring program, and somehow that turned into a six-month turf war over who was dragging who. He said the altos sat on the tempo. I said the tenors scooped every note like it was ice cream.

"Because it's expressive," he said.

"Because nobody taught you to breathe properly."

Nadine told me I should let it go. Our director, Marge, pretended not to notice. But Marge noticed everything. She'd just stop the whole choir and say "again," and look at the two of us, and I'd feel my ears go hot.

Anyway. Second-to-last Thursday in April. Final practice before the concert in two weeks.

Marge kept us late. The piece giving us trouble was the Fauré, the one with the tenor line that climbs and climbs and then hands off to the altos right at the top. It's a hard handoff. Too slow and it sags, too fast and it sounds like somebody dropped the baton.

We ran it four times. The first two were fine. The third one, David came in early and I dragged the response, and Marge stopped us and said, "Again," and looked at the two of us the way she always does.

The fourth one was worse. David and I got into this little game of each pushing the tempo at each other, and by the end it was a train wreck. Marge called it a night early, which for her is basically a declaration of war.

"Fix it by next week or I'm splitting the handoff between Dean and Lucy," she said, packing her scores. "And go home, I need to lock up."

Everybody filed out. Coffee urn off, lights half down, the whole thing. I stayed.

I always stay a few minutes on practice nights, honestly. I'm an accountant, I keep the choir's ledger, and I'd fallen behind on reconciling the sheet music fund. So I sat in a back pew with my laptop and my ledger sheets and did my boring little numbers while the hall went quiet.

Except it didn't go quiet.

After a bit I heard the piano lid come up. Then a single note, then a scale. Somebody was warming up. And I knew that voice before I placed it, because there's exactly one tenor in this choir who practices scales like he's being graded on them.

I closed the laptop partway. I know, I know. But the back pews are right by the storage hallway, and the storage closet door doesn't shut all the way anymore, it never has, there's a gap like an inch wide. And David had set up at the piano in the main hall, which meant if I stood in the closet doorway with the lights off, I could see him through the crack.

So I did that. I stood in a dark storage closet full of vestments and folding chairs and watched my nemesis warm up. I want it noted that this was not a plan. It was just... where my feet went.

He ran the Fauré line. Just the tenor part, alone, from the top. And look, I already knew he was good. You don't get soloist spots by being mediocre. But hearing it with nobody else covering it, no altos to argue with, no Marge, just him and that ugly piano, was different. He took the climb slow, planted every note, and the handoff point came and he held the top note out over the silence like he was daring the altos to follow him.

Annoying. It was annoying how good it was. That's the word I'll use.

He ran it again. Better. Then he stopped, shook his head at the piano, and said, to nobody, "Still early on the entrance."

Except it wasn't the tenor entrance he was talking about. He was marking my part. Singing my entrance against his, figuring out where I kept sitting back.

And I don't know why that got under my skin the way it did. Maybe because he was working on our problem alone, in an empty hall at nine at night, when I'd assumed he didn't care at all and just liked being right at me.

He stopped mid-run and turned toward the hallway.

"You going to lurk in there all night, or are you going to sing it?"

I froze. Closet full of vestments, laptop under my arm, lights off. Busted.

"How did you..." I pushed the door the rest of the way open. "I was doing the ledger."

"The ledger requires standing in a dark closet with the door cracked?"

"The door was already cracked. It's always cracked. You know it's always cracked, you've complained about it."

He laughed. He actually laughed, and it changed his whole face, and I hated noticing that.

"Come here," he said. "We're fixing this tonight. Marge gave us a week. I'd rather have the week."

"Everyone just left. It's after nine."

"And we're both here, and the piano's warm, and you heard my run-through, so you already know I'm right about the tempo."

"You're not right about the tempo."

"Then prove it." He scooted a chair over, the good one from behind the piano, not a folding chair. "One-on-one. Just the handoff, over and over, until it stops being a fight and starts being music. I'll sing tenor. You sing alto. Nobody else has to hear us butcher it."

I should have gone home. I had a half-reconciled ledger and an early morning and a very clear policy about David.

I set the laptop on the piano instead.

"One condition," I said. "When I'm right, you say so. Out loud. In words."

"Deal. And when I'm right, you stop blaming my breathing."

"It's a terrible deal for me," I said, and he laughed again, and we started.

First run-through, we clashed. He pushed, I held, and the handoff came out like two people trying to exit a doorway at once. Second one, same. Third one he said, "You're listening to me now. Stop. Listen to the line, not to me."

"That's the stupidest advice I've ever..."

"It's real advice. Singers do it all the time. You're so busy guarding your entrance that you're not singing the phrase."

Fourth run-through, I tried it. Stopped watching him out of the corner of my eye. Sang my line like the altos owned the room. And the handoff came, and he gave me the top note, and I took it, and it fit. It just fit, clean, like the two parts had always been one line that somebody had sawn in half and we'd put it back together.

We both stopped. Looked at each other.

"Again," he said quietly.

We ran it again. And again. And somewhere around the sixth time, I stopped keeping count of who was right.

We took a break around eleven. He dug a bag of stale pretzels out of his jacket and offered it over like it was communion.

"Quality refreshment," I said.

"You're welcome."

We sat on the stage edge, feet dangling, eating sad pretzels. And that's when he did it. We ran the handoff once more, casual, sitting there, and he deliberately came in off the beat. Early. Sloppy. On purpose. I could tell it was on purpose because he was watching me while he did it, little smirk, waiting.

And I snapped. Full volume, empty hall, no filter.

"Would you STOP doing that! You know exactly where the beat is, you've known where the beat is since 1947, and you keep dragging it like some kind of..."

I stopped. Because he was laughing. Not the smug laugh from practices, not the one he used when Nadine agreed with him about my counting. A real one, bent forward, hand on his knee.

"What?" I said. "What is funny right now?"

"You," he said, wheezing a little. "Your face. You look like I personally insulted your ancestors."

"Off-tempo singing IS an insult to my ancestors."

"Nobody has ever yelled at me like that over a quarter note."

"Then nobody has ever cared about a quarter note around you. That's not a compliment to you, by the way."

"It's a little bit a compliment."

And here is what I did not expect. Heat. Actual heat, climbing up my neck, because he was looking at me when he laughed, really looking, and his face did that thing again, the unguarded thing, and my body responded to it like it had been waiting in line. I took a drink of my coffee to hide whatever my face was doing. The coffee was cold and terrible and I drank the whole cup.

"Again," I said, standing. "From the top. Correctly this time."

"Yes ma'am."

We ran it clean. Twice. Three times. It kept fitting. Somewhere in there I stopped hating the sound of his voice leading mine, which felt like a small personal defeat, so I chose not to think about it.

He stretched after the last one, arms over his head, and groaned. "I haven't done a real practice session in years. This is why I stopped doing practice sessions."

"You're lazy."

"I'm efficient. There's a difference and it's on my business cards."

"So your sales pitch to clients is that you'll do the minimum?"

"My sales pitch is that I'm charming and they never check."

I laughed. Out loud, at David, at one of his jokes. I heard it leave my body and there was no taking it back. He raised his eyebrows and I flipped my hand at him like, move on, and mercifully he did.

We packed up slow after that. Neither of us said anything about leaving. He put the chairs back against the wall, I closed the laptop, and the hall got that settled quiet it gets, just the furnace ticking and Marge's metronome ticking slightly out of sync with it, which drives me crazy every single week.

"So," he said, zipping his jacket. "Same time Thursday?"

"That's the regular practice."

"I mean after. Just us."

I should mention something here. I've been circling it the whole story and it's the reason this night mattered more than the handoff ever did. Three years ago, my breakup. I've said it already, the relationship before this one, the one that ended when I was 31. What I have not said, out loud, to anyone in this choir, is that it was with a woman. Claire, from my old firm. Two years. It wasn't a secret, exactly. It just wasn't a thing I offered up. My sister knows. My last three dates know, that is, the last three men I went to dinner with and never called back, because something in me kept stalling out and I told myself it was them and honestly maybe it was them. Maybe it wasn't.

David was zipping up his jacket and I said it. Just dropped it in the middle of the quiet hall like a hymnal falling off a shelf.